Artist Statement

I remember this day from my childhood vividly. I was three years old and it was a gloriously sunny morning at the zoo with my family. I was sitting on the shoulders of my Uncle Dave, and I wore a bright red baseball cap to shield my eyes from the glare of the sun. As we watched a giraffe happily chewing on some leaves provided to him by his keeper, it stopped chewing and awkwardly walked over to the fence where we stood. The giraffe stretched his long neck down over the fence, and gently took the baseball cap from my head, and retreated back to the center of his yard. It was an amazing experience that I told people for years. The only problem with this story is that it never actually happened.

How could something that I remembered with such detail be a figment of my imagination? This is the question that drives my work. How is it that images and scenes are perceived, stitched together as memories, and then recalled? How are memories created of events that never took place? How do five different people have five different memories of the same event?

Salvador Dali once said “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.” Memories are like circles, never ending, no beginning, constantly trying to find an origin. Take multiple memories and try to stack them together and there are gaps; small spaces that require interpretation to fill in the details. It is in this place that I find myself; trying to fill in the gaps, trying to make sense of what I am seeing and of what I am feeling; trying to create an understandable thought out of unintelligible pieces. It is the ultimate conundrum, and it is the inability to find the solution that keeps me searching.